Category: Chess

Average Centipawn Loss

Centipawn

The centipawn is the unit of measure used in chess as measure of the advantage. A centipawn is equal to 1/100 of a pawn. Therefore 100 centipawns = 1 pawn. These values play no formal role in the game but are useful to players, and essentials in computer chess, in order to evaluate positions. The pieces have usually an integer value in pawns, but using the centipawn allows strategic features of the position, worth less than a single pawn, to be evaluated without requiring fractions.

Standard Valuation

The following is the most common assignment of point values:

:The queen is worth 900 
:Each rook is worth 500; 
:Each knight is worth 300; 
:Each bishop is worth 300; 
:Each pawn is worth 100 centipawns.

The value of the king is undefined as it cannot be captured, let alone traded, during the course of the game. Some early computer chess programs gave the king an arbitrary large value (such as 100,000,000 centipawns) to indicate that the inevitable loss of the king due to checkmate trumps all other considerations. In the endgame, when there is little danger of checkmate, the fighting value of the king is about four pawns. The king is good at attacking and defending nearby pieces and pawns. It is better at defending such pieces than the knight is, and it is better at attacking them than the bishop is.

Analysis

A perfect move will lose zero centipawn, but lesser moves will result in a deterioration of the position, measured in centipawn.

This value can be used as an indicator of the quality of play. The less centipawns one loses per move, the stronger the play.

These numbers are provided by the computer analysis, which is powered by Stockfish.
Centipawn loss is how many hundredths of a pawn your move differs from the engine’s best move.
The closer to zero your score the better you are.
Average Centipawn Loss is simply the average of all the centipawn losses per move over a whole game, or even many games if you care to calculate.

Lichess Average CentiPawn Loss

Lichess Chess Insights provide you with these detailed analysis of your game.
Profile-> Chess Insights.
It would open door for plethora of structured data to do analysis and improve your game.

Ajinkya Wavare Average CentiPawn Loss :
https://lichess.org/insights/wavareajinkya/acpl/variant

Eg:

Ps: The lower the better.
High Rated players have these values in the range of 20-35.

Reference:

http://chess.wikia.com/wiki/Centipawn

https://lichess.org/qa/103/what-is-average-centipawn-loss

https://chess.fandom.com/wiki/Centipawn

FIDE Online Arena

FIDE ONLINE ARENA:

FIDE online arena is powered by premiumchess.net

Website:

FIDE Online ARENA: https://arena.myfide.net/

Premium Chess : https://www.premiumchess.net/

After registration woth AICF, FIDE ID would be created which would pave way for creating account on the FIDE online arena.

Different types of memberships are provided. By default Guest Membership  is given to the players.

Download the FIDE Arena App: https://arena.myfide.net/registration-and-fees/download

Download the version depending upon your OS.
It’s a jnlp file.

How to run jnlp: Run JNLP Program

Enjoy playing chess!! 🙂

 

Chess Books

Chess books referred:

  1. The Chess Course by Praful Zaveri 
  2. Winning Chess Openings (Winning Chess Series) by Seirawan, Yasser
  3. Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess by Bobby Fischer
  4. International Chess Tournament 1953: Zurich (Dover Chess)
    Bronshtein, D.I.
  5. Silmans Complete Endgame Course: From Beginner to Master
    Silman, I.M. Jeremy
  6. How to Reassess Your Chess: Chess Mastery Through Chess Imbalances by Jeremy Silman

Chess Clock

 

Chess Resources

Websites

    1. Chess.com is a good website.
    2. en.lichess.org. It’s free.
    3. http://chesstempo.com/ Best website for practicing tactics, membership is free.
    4. http://www.thechesswebsite.com/ Covers every aspect of Chess with videos and puzzles, almost free but paying can give you access to more features on the site.
    5. http://www.chessgames.com/ Website containing active chess community and lots of Grandmaster games.
    6. http://chess-db.com/public/index.jsp
    7. http://www.redhotpawn.com/
    8. http://en.chessbase.com/
    9. https://chess24.com/
    10. http://www.365chess.com/
    11. https://www.freechess.org/
    12. https://www.chessclub.com/
    13. https://www.chessable.com

Books

  1. Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess
  2. Winning Chess Openings (Winning Chess Series)
  3. International Chess Tournament 1953: Zurich (Dover Chess)
  4. Silman’s Complete Endgame Course: From Beginner to Master
  5. How to Reassess Your Chess: Chess Mastery Through Chess Imbalances
  6. The Chess Course

Chess Engine Rating And Chess Games Db

Chess Engine Rating

ELO Rating

The Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in zero-sum games such as chess. It is named after its creator Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-American physics professor.

The Elo system was originally invented as an improved chess rating system over the previously used Harkness system, but is also used as a rating system for multiplayer competition in a number of video games, association football, American football, basketball,Major League Baseball, table tennis, Scrabble, board games such as Diplomacy and other games.

The difference in the ratings between two players serves as a predictor of the outcome of a match. Two players with equal ratings who play against each other are expected to score an equal number of wins. A player whose rating is 100 points greater than their opponent’s is expected to score 64%; if the difference is 200 points, then the expected score for the stronger player is 76%.

A player’s Elo rating is represented by a number which increases or decreases depending on the outcome of games between rated players. After every game, the winning player takes points from the losing one. The difference between the ratings of the winner and loser determines the total number of points gained or lost after a game. In a series of games between a high-rated player and a low-rated player, the high-rated player is expected to score more wins. If the high-rated player wins, then only a few rating points will be taken from the low-rated player. However, if the lower rated player scores an upset win, many rating points will be transferred. The lower rated player will also gain a few points from the higher rated player in the event of a draw. This means that this rating system is self-correcting. A player whose rating is too low should, in the long run, do better than the rating system predicts, and thus gain rating points until the rating reflects their true playing strength.

Strengths of modern day chess engines:

The rating and stats of the chess engines can be found at

http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/

Stockfish, an open source chess engine has been on the top for quite some time.

Chess Games Database

Chess games are ususally saved in the pgn format. A huge collection of chess games can be found on the internet.

Starters for Games Database:

1) PGNMentor

https://www.pgnmentor.com/files.html

It has huge collection of games. It has segregated games by players, openings, midgames, endgames etc.

2) Kingbase

http://www.kingbase-chess.net/

Millbase for scid has been discontinued. The successor to this is kingbase. It has over 2.2+ million games. The contents are also updated on a monthly basis.

3) Rebel

http://www.top-5000.nl/pgn.htm

4) GorgoBase

http://gorgonian.weebly.com/pgn.html

Reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

Chess Engines

Protocols

1) Xboard

XBoard is a graphical chessboard for the X Window System. It is developed and maintained as free software by the GNU project. WinBoard is a port of XBoard to run natively on Microsoft Windows.

Originally developed by Tim Mann, these programs are compatible with various chess engines that support the Chess Engine Communication Protocol such as GNU Chess.It also supports Internet Chess Servers, e-mail chess, and the playing of saved games.

XBoard/WinBoard remain updated, and the Chess Engine Communication Protocol has been extended to meet the needs of modern engines (which have features such as hash tables, multi-processing and end-game tables, which could not be controlled through the old protocol).

Tim Mann’s website: http://tim-mann.org/engines.html

2) UCI

A Universal Chess Interface (UCI) is an open communication protocol that enables chess engines to communicate with user interfaces.
In November 2000, the UCI protocol was released. Designed by Rudolf Huber and Stefan Meyer-Kahlen, the author of Shredder, UCI rivals the older “Chess Engine Communication Protocol” introduced with XBoard/WinBoard. Both protocols have been free to use without license fees.

In 2002, Chessbase, the chess software company which markets Fritz, began to support UCI, which had previously been supported by only a few interfaces and engines.

As of 2007, well over 100 engines are known to directly support UCI.

Stockfish

Stockfish is a free and open-source UCI chess engine, available for various desktop and mobile platforms. It is developed by Marco Costalba, Joona Kiiski, Gary Linscott and Tord Romstad, with many contributions from a community of open-source developers.

Stockfish is consistently ranked first or near the top of most chess-engine rating lists and is the strongest open-source chess engine in the world.It won the unofficial world computer chess championships in season 6 (2014), season 9 (2016), season 11 (2018) and season 12 (2018). It finished runner-up in season 5 (2013), season 7 (2014) and season 8 (2015). Stockfish is derived from Glaurung, an open-source engine by Romstad.

Stockfish Repo: https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish

Installing In Ubuntu
A comprehensive list of all the buntu chess packages has been prepared by ubuntu dev.
Package list: https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/games-chess

sudo apt-get install pychess scid eboard phalanx gnuchess gnuchess-book stockfish polyglot fruit glaurung hoichess phalanx polyglot pychess scid toga2 xboard sjeng fairymax crafty

Interfaces: pychess scid eboard gnuchess

GNU Chess provides a simple yet powerful interface. It also supports addition of multiple chess engines to it.

gnuchess --version
gnuchess --help
info gnuchess

SCID

Shane’s Chess Information Database (Scid) is an open source UNIX, Windows, Linux, and Mac application for viewing and maintaining huge databases of chess games. It has features comparable to popular commercial chess software. Scid is written in Tcl/Tk and C++.

Scid has undergone several stages of development. Firstly by Shane Hudson, and then Pascal Georges.

Every toolkit provides mechanism to add the installed chess engines. Add the engines from the preferences in the toolkit. The installed chess engine can be used in the analysis of the game as well as act the brains of the opponent in a Human Vs Computer match.

SCID development has stopped in 2016.

Setting up SCID: https://ilikewhenit.works/blog/7

A newer toolkit called SCID VS PC is now available.

SCID vs PC

Remove scid package if installed from the apt install command mentioned above

Download the package from official site: http://scidvspc.sourceforge.net/

Installing the package making use of the steps mentioned in the documentation

Running Scid Vs PC

nohup scid &

Tutorial for installation:
http://www.linuxx.eu/2012/11/scid-vs-pc-installation-guide-ubuntu.html

The tcl tk libraries 8.6 version is already installed in Ubuntu bionic. Therefore, shouldn’t be a problem as mentioned above.

Database and saved games:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG2yRGlL1iU

It gives a brief idea about how to save games and open games from pgn files

 

Reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBoard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Chess_Interface
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockfish_(chess)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shane%27s_Chess_Information_Database